today once again..almost like clockwork...our quotes and execs froze. At least it didn't last long and it was during slop and chop lunch. However, I don't know if you other swifties pay attention to the IRC channel but it's starting to sound like a broken record: Branch Manager: Our trader can't get out of position because of the ghost orders created by the latest GBOL. Swift-Trade "support": Log out, log back in, hit delete 50 billion times. If that doesn't work, repeat. Half the day later..... Branch Manager: We've done what you said 15 times already...our trader still can't get out and he's offside $2000 now. Swift-Trade "support": Log out, log back in, hit delete 50 billion times. If that doesn't work, repeat. Ridiculous! I'm just glad this doesn't happen to me. On top of that, anyone who had winning positions Friday when the system crashed doesn't get to keep their gain. BS.
There is no excuse for the amount of downtime due to technical failure. I don't know the speicifics, but if hosting companies can offer close to 100% uptime you would imagine Swift Trade with the amount of money being sent through in transactions would have their servers up just as much as any competent host. There are also other methods of having multiple servers where the load is split between them and when one goes down the load is shifted to the one that's up. Downtime once in awhile is fine and ultimately inevitable, but what's been going on the past few days is ridiculous. Would you ever see Amazon go down and lose an entire business day? Never.
I think that is hard to do when your software is writen in Microsoft Excel. Plus with all the new branches opening up in Asia land, Excel is having hard time updating it's database with all the new users. It's the same problem experinced by many businesses, they try to expand too fast without having proper infrastracutre in place thinking they can get away with it. And then it comes back to bite them in the ass. As someone else said "If Sharif wasn't an 8 year old" and they hired real IT people instead of the rejectes from community colleges then maybe the system would be better.